Everybody Dances

by
Thomas A. Droleskey

They wave their arms and they snap their fingers
And they clap and holler “Olé!”
And everybody dances, everybody dances.
They wave their arms and they snap their fingers
And they clap and holler “Olé!”
And everybody dances, and they snap their fingers,
And they clap and holler “Olé!”
They holler “Olé!”
They don’t know why they act that way.
They wave their arms and they snap their fingers
And they clap and holler “Olé!”

They play their DVD’s on great big TV’s
With their burgers piled on a tray,
And everybody watches, everybody watches.
Their muscles slacken and their conscience blackens
As they drink their cola and beer.
And everybody watches, and they snap their fingers,
And they clap and holler “Olé!”
Though they’re losing their mind,
They’re a part of the “left behind,”
They watch their TV’s and they drink their colas
And they clap and holler “Olé!”

They spend our money and they steal our country
And they send our children away,
And everything stretches, everything stretches.
They spend our money and they steal our country
And our children die far away,
And everything stretches with the debt we’re under
And they’ll take our country away.
Can we still make it right,
If He gives us the strength to fight?
Or we wave our arms and we snap our fingers
And we clap and holler “Olé!”

They snapped their fingers, and they stole our country,
And they took our children away!

"Everybody Dances," by Fr. Louis J. Campbell
May 29, 2007

With gratitude to Father Louis J. Campbell for the permission he gave me to post his recording of his own compositions, Everybody Dances and Los Cristeros, two of fifteen of songs he has composed that are on a compact disk that he gave us on Tuesday, February 10, 2009, I believe that there could be no better way to "bookend" the text of this brief article than by featuring Father Campbell's recordings of these two songs (along with the words, sort of a "Sing Along with Father Campbell" for those of you familiar with Sing Along With Mitch.)

Yes, "everybody dances" describes the behavior of people in the midst of an economic collapse that is precipitating the nationalization of large elements of the American economy, starting with the banking industry (Citigroup and Bank of America) and the insurance industry (American International Group). As I noted in in
Figures of Antichrist nearly four months ago now, most Americans, including most baptized Catholics, the purpose of their own daily lives and thus the purpose of government itself boils down to the acquisition and retention of what is said to constitute "wealth" in order to possess various material goods, which are said to be the "means" of human happiness. In other words, "it's all about the money."

Lost in this ocean of naturalism is any concept of the fact that we are living through a chastisement for the fact that the United States of America and other "developed" nations have promoted all manner of hideous sins under cover of the civil law and throughout what passes for "popular culture." Nations whose citizens lose sight of First and Last Things and plunge themselves in an abyss of licentiousness and materialism wind up teetering on the brink of social and economic chaos until they collapse. No one's "stimulus package" is going to "restore" that which was built on sand in the first place, namely, a level of economic "prosperity" that premised its continuation on the belief that man's first and last end revolves exclusively around his material well-being and that the Incarnation and Redemptive Act of the God-Man, no less the Deposit of Faith that He has revealed through and entrusted to His Catholic Church exclusively for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, is a matter of complete indifference to human well-being in this life as a preparation for eternal happiness in the glory of the Beatific Vision in the next.

The late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, though hostile to the true Faith as a Russian Orthodox nationalist, had, nevertheless, some interesting insights into the "psyche" (the soul) of the West in its captivity to a consumer materialism that is but the "flip side," if you will," of the dialectical materialism of Bolshevism:

When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development. The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?

Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask. . . .

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity? (Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address.)

These keen insights, offered by Solzhenitsyn in his famous commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, are, of course, incomplete. It is only the Catholic Faith, the one and only true Faith, that teaches man the purpose of human existence and gives him the means to know, love and serve God by teaching what He has revealed to us in the Deposit of Faith and by imparting into our immortal souls the Sanctifying Graces necessary to live in accord with this teaching as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world. Men will indeed plunge into an abyss of chaos and disarray once they divorce themselves from the truths of the Catholic Faith, living only for the moment, not in light of the simple fact that they will face Christ the King as their Judge at the moments of their Particular Judgments, judgments which are premised upon everything they do and say in this passing, mortal vale of tears.

No element of our lives is exempt from an adherence to the Deposit of Faith. Matters of politics and economics fall, as do all other human activities without any exception at all, in the realm of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Men are free to devise particular political and governmental structures as they see fit, keeping in mind their duty to recognize the true Faith and to acknowledge the fact that the Catholic Church has the right, exercised only as a Last Resort following the discharge of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to intervene with those who exercise civil power when the good of souls demands her motherly intervention. Men are also free to arrange their temporal affairs for the improvement of their own lots materially as long as they keep in mind the fact that such material well-being is not the principal end of human existence and that they must have a profound sense of detachment from the goods that God in His Holy Providence permits them to acquire, making sure to use the first portion of gifts they have earned legitimately as the fruit of their honest labors and talents for His greater honor and glory.

Accordingly, We first of all declare that all Catholics have a sacred and inviolable duty, both in private and public life, to obey and firmly adhere to and fearlessly profess the principles of Christian truth enunciated by the teaching office of the Catholic Church. In particular We mean those principles which Our Predecessor has most wisely laid down in the encyclical letter "Rerum Novarum." We know that the Bishops of Prussia followed these most faithfully in their deliberations at the Fulda Congress of 1900. You yourselves have summarized the fundamental ideas of these principles in your communications regarding this question.

These are fundamental principles: No matter what the Christian does, even in the realm of temporal goods, he cannot ignore the supernatural good. Rather, according to the dictates of Christian philosophy, he must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good. All his actions, insofar as they are morally either good or bad (that is to say, whether they agree or disagree with the natural and divine law), are subject to the judgment and judicial office of the Church. All who glory in the name of Christian, either individually or collectively, if they wish to remain true to their vocation, may not foster enmities and dissensions between the classes of civil society. On the contrary, they must promote mutual concord and charity. The social question and its associated controversies, such as the nature and duration of labor, the wages to be paid, and workingmen's strikes, are not simply economic in character. Therefore they cannot be numbered among those which can be settled apart from ecclesiastical authority. "The precise opposite is the truth. It is first of all moral and religious, and for that reason its solution is to be expected mainly from the moral law and the pronouncements of religion."

Unlike the contention of certain Catholics who subscribe to the falsehood of libertarianism, the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church does indeed bind the consciences of every person on the face of this earth without any exception whatsoever. While there is indeed a wide latitude given to men in their concrete circumstances concerning the application of this teaching, something noted very specifically by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931, one cannot claim that the Catholic Church has no right to bind consciences concerning the binding moral precepts that are to govern us in our political and economic affairs. Indeed, Pope Pius XI had noted in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that the Social Teaching enunciated by his predecessors remained forever in force and that those who dissented from it were nothing other than social modernists:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.

It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements which We have made; it is no less necessary to reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance. This is particularly important in the case of youth, and especially those who aspire to the priesthood, so that in the almost universal confusion in which we live they at least, as the Apostle writes, will not be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." (Ephesians iv, 14) (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

No economist or economic theorist "trumps" this teaching. None.

For, you see, both the statists of the present time, including the Wizard of Obama, and those naturalists who oppose him from the "right" (including "conservatives" and libertarians), both agree, although perhaps in an inchoate sense, that the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church is irrelevant to the right order of man's temporal affairs, undertaken with a view to the pursuit of man's Last End. Neither the collectivists of the Obama administration or his incompetent opponents in the false opposite of the naturalist"right" accept these simple truths stated so clearly by Pope Saint Pius X in Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error."

All "strategies," including those being advanced at present by the penultimate statist Barack Hussein Obama, who is masking his absolute and unswerving commitment to the further nationalization of the American economy (much, of course, was done in this regard by the administration of President George Walker Bush, Y2K's Lesser Evil Has Brought Us Great Evils and
Socialism, Straight From Your "Pro-Life" Conservative in the "velvet" of his smooth use of the rhetoric of ambiguity and euphemisms, and those advanced by supporters of the unbridled "free market," whose "invisible hand" is absolutely nonexistent (A Really Invisible Hand), will fail.

Even The Los Angeles Times, not exactly a bastion of Catholic Social Teaching, has editorialized on the emptiness of the Wizard of Obama's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2010 and its plans to spend billions upon billions of dollars that the Federal government does not have to spend:

President Obama certainly kept one promise about his budget request for fiscal 2010: It's honest, at least by the capital's standards. But in spite of Obama's call Tuesday to "sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars," the document could hardly be described as an exercise in belt-tightening. Instead, it makes clear how difficult it may be for Obama to get the federal government back on the sound fiscal footing it enjoyed before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

As Obama had pledged, the budget no longer hides the cost of the two wars being fought overseas. Nor does it pretend that the federal government is finished pouring money into the financial system. That's not to say it's a model of realistic accounting. As all presidential budgets are prone to do, Obama's relies on rosier economic projections than most forecasters use. It also maintains the practice of offsetting the deficit with money reserved for future retirees. As a result, its estimates for future revenue and deficits are optimistic, even quixotic.

Accepting the administration's numbers, the budget shows the deficit being cut in half by the end of Obama's current term. But having narrowed the fiscal gap as far as he promised, the president proposes to go no further. Instead, the deficit is projected to rise steadily as the economy grows, instead of shrinking as it did in the 1990s. That's true in part because the administration doesn't predict any savings in fast-growing Medicaid, Medicare or retirement costs, despite its ambition to rein in healthcare costs and shore up Social Security. But another important factor is the additional benefits, tax cuts and domestic programs that Obama wants to fund, which eat into the savings he proposes to achieve through tax hikes and benefit reductions.

Obama makes no bones about it -- his immediate goal is not just to stimulate the economy but to change its priorities. For example, he proposes to raise more than $950 billion over 10 years by rolling back President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, then give $770 billion of that to low- and middle-income taxpayers through lower rates and higher credits. He would cut billions of dollars in subsidies for farms and private student-loan providers, but more than offset those savings by spending more on college loans, worker retraining, nutrition, health and housing programs. If not for $1.5 trillion in projected savings on the wars and nearly $650 billion in new levies on emissions, Obama's proposal wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. And even with those controversial elements, his budget still leaves half of the deficit-cutting job undone. (Obama's budget.)

It's pretty bad when an editorial board whose naturalism of the "leftist" bent is consistent and predictable can find much fault with the "economics" of the budget proposed by a penultimate statist, whose fellow "wizards" on his economic team are as clueless as he is about First and Last Things--and thus clueless about how to achieve the right ordering of man's temporal well-being here in this passing, mortal vale of tears.

The more "conservative" editorial board of The Manchester Union-Leader had a similar analysis as that found in The Los Angeles Times:

In nine words of his Wednesday night address to Congress, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he was not for big government. In the remaining 5,893 words, he proved those nine untrue.

The agenda the President put forward is the largest expansion of the federal government at least since the Great Society and probably since the New Deal. It would not simply pump short-term cash into the economy and the credit markets. It would fundamentally reorder America's relationship with Washington.

Worse, it would do so in ways that are economically destructive. "Now is the time to act boldly and wisely," the President said. That is true. His plan is bold, but profoundly unwise.

The President believes that the current recession, which the Federal Reserve chairman estimated on Wednesday could be over by the end of the year, justifies trillions of dollars in new federal initiatives, financed by debt, to remake the economy. He wants to borrow billions to impose on the rest of us his ideas about what energy sources we should use, how we should pay for health care, how credit markets should work and dozens of other subjects.

Not only does the recession not justify such a massive transfer of money and power to Washington, but merely borrowing such a sum will restrict economic growth down the road.

The President's own words do not match his actions. He decries irresponsible borrowing and spending while irresponsibly borrowing and spending. He opposes big government while initiating one of the largest expansions of government in U.S. history. He praises bipartisanship while dismissing Republican ideas out of hand.

We have a President who believes he can fool the American people into accepting a radical agenda by simply telling us it is not what it plainly is. It is time the American people started paying more attention to what President Obama is doing and less attention to what he is saying. (Obama's Words: Pretty, But Untrue.)

Unfortunately, naturalists of the "left" and of the "right" do not think in terms of chastisement. Those of us who are Catholics understand that a nation that kills over four thousand innocent human beings a day by means of surgical abortion alone and that exports all manner of evils abroad will never--as in never--realize long-term material prosperity. God will not be mocked. Although He is patient and all-Merciful, He will indeed let us suffer the consequences of our own sins if we do not cease their commission and then repent of our having committed them. The Wizard of Obama's administration can print all of the "funny money" it wants to enslave future generations of Americans to the power of the civil state and to a burden of debt that is unimaginable without producing the "economic recovery" that is said, despite all of the indications to the contrary (levels of unemployment, which have reached ten percent in the State of California, the stagnation of the Gross Domestic Product, the demands being made by "private" firms for more "assistance" from the Federal government), to be possibly within reach by the end of the year 2010.

No amount of naturalism, whether it be the sort of the "smooth" kind of "leftism" articulated by Barack Hussein Obama or the rather stiff and awkward-sounding "conservative" that came forth in a sing-song fashion from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, is going to "save" the day temporally for the United States of America or for the rest of the "developed" world. The bill for our sins has come due.

The time of reckoning is at hand.

Nations that continue to mock God by the promotion of surgical and chemical baby-killing and by the promotion of immodest dress and indecency of speech and the horrors of popular "entertainment," including "rock music," will founder on the shoals of their own false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles.

Nations whose economies are premised upon the Judeo-Masonic-Calvinist injustice of usury that enslaves large numbers of their citizens under mountains upon mountains of personal debt will find it impossible to "restore" an economic prosperity that was realized at the cost of offending God and doing great injustices to the souls which He redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. Although people may indeed be "dancing" to "bread and circuses" of professional and collegiate sports and entertainment as they place their trust in their fellow semi-Pelagians (that is, men possessed of the belief that they can more or less "stir up" graces within themselves to do whatever it is they desire to accomplish, themes that were common to both the Obama and Jindal addresses of Tuesday, February 24, 2009) to "restore" an economic prosperity built on one sin after another, starting with usury itself.

Dare I say it again for the very few people who read this site? Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

The Catholic Church is not opposed man's temporal well-being. Indeed, she alone has the means to provide for the measure of man's temporal well-being as it is pursued in light of man's Last End. It was she, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, who provided for the institutions of Mercy to care for the poor and the orphans and the sick and the disabled during the Middle of Ages as she cared for those who had been discarded by the pagans or deemed "damned" by God by the tenets of various false religions:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favour of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is-beyond all question, in large measure, through religion, under whose auspices so many great undertakings were set on foot, through whose aid they were brought to completion.

This is a marvelous statement of how Holy Mother Church provided for the needs of the suffering in the Middle Ages.

Alas, Pope Leo XIII did not foresee the fact that the agents of naturalism--assisted by the forces of the counterfeit church of conciliarism--would indeed blot out and obscure the remembrance of the glories of the Middle Ages when Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ reigned as the King of men and their nations. He did not foresee that the Mohammedans would be welcomed into a de-Catholicized and de-populated Europe by those who have claimed, albeit falsely, to be Successors of Saint Peter. He did not foresee that superstition would be incorporated by those antipopes into what claims to be the Sacred Liturgy of the Catholic Church. And it is because the overthrow of the confessionally Catholic civil state organized around the principles Social Christ the King, an overthrow that was wrought by the Protestant Revolt and institutionalized by the various and interrelated forces of Judeo-Masonry and the slew of naturalistic political "ideologies" and "philosophies" that are premised upon religious indifferentism and/or anthropocentrism (man as the center of all activity to the exclusion of God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church), has been certified by the counterfeit church of concilairism as something "good" in and of itself that it is so difficult for even many believing Catholics to make a break from the naturalistic falsehoods of the false opposites of the "left" or of the "right."

We must, however, never lose sight of the important truths as cited by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:

"The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity." (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 29, 1929)

We can be certain that there will be no improvement in our temporal situation until and unless there is a profound conversion of souls to accept this simple truth: "For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity."

We can play some small part, please God and by the graces He sends to us through the loving hands of His Most Blessed Mother, she who is the Mediatrix of All graces, of effecting this conversion, especially by means of taking this Lenten season of prayer, penance, mortification and almsgiving seriously, spending extra time in prayer before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and by praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. We may not see the fruit of the seeds that we attempt to plant in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen. However, we must persevere in the planting of our sins, having the courage of the Cristeros in Mexico, whose valor in behalf of the King of men and their nations has been put to music by the aforementioned Father Louis J. Campbell, Los Cristeros:

Do you remember Los Cristeros?
In Mexico their fame was won.
Like you and me they loved their children,
And loved to see the morning sun.
But one day – such tears and cries among them –
Their shrines and their saints were taken from them.
Such treachery done them!
But they cried: “Viva Cristo Rey!”

They rose as light against the darkness;
They must defend their Church and land.
In face of firing squad or cannon,
They stood with courage hand in hand.
Their lifeblood flowed free amid the flowers,
As they fell there in battle through the hours,
Yet hearts faith empowers,
And they cried: “Viva Cristo Rey!”

You must remember Los Cristeros,
And live your life the best you can.
For in the distance, hear the thunder;
There comes the enemy of man.
But in life or death we’ll stand together,
The Cristeros’ song we will remember,
Though life we surrender,
As we cry: “Viva Cristo Rey!”

Yes, my friends, we live and work for the day when all men and women around the world will participate in the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and thus exclaim the glories of her Divine Son with shouts of "Viva Cristo Rey!"